V., gorgeous, distraught, at the 10th anniversary of being forever 21, is legs up on a large leather sofa, talking to her bestie, $475-an-hour PR maven Boopsie, wearing a We are One Clippers jersey and little else:

“Boopsie, you said it would be quite the week, and to hold on to the chic little trilby from Chloe on Melrose, but you never said it would be like this.”

Crackling through the iPhone speaker comes Boopsie Mandarin from Manhattan: “A girl can’t buy this kind of publicity! I told you it’d hit the Times, and we got front page New York Times, three days running! Clearly I’m not charging you enough!”

“You told me,” says V., eye on a second iPhone, scrolling through a Twitter feed, “that if we leaked just a little bit about The Donald’s crackpot views about race, that it’d just up the ante and help get me that second Ferrari. You did not tell me it would bring down the wrath of Barack Obama speaking from Indonesia and every Tom, Dick and Harry speaking from Everywhere, U.S.A.”

“Kid, a girl can’t help it when the plan goes viral! Days ago my V. is little Maria from East L.A., chickadee who got her boobs done as a senior at Roosevelt, now she’s on top of the world!”

“God, can you believe that story says not just Donald but Rochelle went to Roosevelt, too? Graduated in ’52 when I’m class of 2000? I knew he was old, but sheesh. Hef territory here. Name of Tokowitz back then. Not too many Tokowitzes left in Boyle Heights, know what I’m saying?”

“Boopsie, I give you, the name V. is on every tongue wagging on the TV. But what’s your Plan B? Not like The Donald gonna spring for that new red Spider now when the witch says it’s coming outta community property! And there’s … the other thing.”

“What thing is that?”

V. here takes a big gulp from her early-afternoon wine spritzer and rearranges her legs.

“It’s that … The Donald, he got canned from the NBA and got me out there as Floozie No. 1 all ’cause he cops to being against people like me. Latina chick whose dad being a black dude means she’s also a black chick and yet I hafta make up a name like being an Italian chick and yet it turns out he’s a Roosevelt High boy too so how’s he any different than me and anyway Roosevelt’s got mayors and congressmen and greats like Willie Davis and I got this guy telling me not to bring any more black dudes to Staples when his whole team is black. What’s that say about this world? What’s it say about me?”

“V., you get some rest. Good questions, for later. Try not to let that Yorkie out the side door again, too, or go roller skating with the visor on in the driveway — just fodder for the paparazzi, like I just saw on TMZ. But, sweetheart, class it up, right? Last chance for some guy in the Hills who can afford the next service on the second Bentley. Leave the civil rights thing to Al Sharpton. Stick with those ambitions on your Instagram: ‘Artist, Lover, Writer, Chef, Poet, Stylist, Philanthropist.’ You might lose the stylist bit if you’re thinking upscale. You on board with me, beautiful?”

But V. has slipped away into the land of nod, the Twitter feed fallen from her long acrylic-nailed fingers, deep in a dream of a Los Angeles where a girl can afford a town home without a creep, where the best basketball team is owned by a feminist Laker Girls collective invested in a future where the question “Who’s your sugar daddy?” need never be answered, or even asked.

Larry Wilson is a member of the Los Angeles News Group editorial board. larry.wilson@langnews.com

Larry Wilson is public editor of the San Gabriel Valley Newspapers and a columnist and member of the editorial board for the Southern California News Group. He was hired as editorial page editor of the Pasadena Star-News in 1987, and then for 12 years was that paper's editor. He now writes editorials for SCNG, a local column in the Star-News on Wednesdays and a regional column for the group on Sundays.

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